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This section was my workspace for philosophy essays between July 2006 and April 2008.
I call this "Prehistoric Kilroy" because it gave me practice for more
disciplined essays in Kilroy Cafe.Also see my philophical blog and Twitter feed.

Issue #53, 12/26/2006

An Existential Crisis

By Glenn CampbellFamily Court Philosopher

An existential crisis is any decision or realization that
forces you to examine the very foundations of your existence.
When you are lost in the wilderness and are fighting for
your survival, that's an existential crisis. It is
not an existential crisis when you go to the store to
buy the latest video game and find that it is sold out.

I take that back. Not finding the right video game might be
an existential crisis for some people. If you have
built all of your future plans around this one pursuit and
your path is blocked, this might call into question
everything that you have perceived about yourself. It could
be even more existential if someone took a hammer to your
precious video game console, which you had previously spent
16 hours a day on. Then, after predictable periods of
denial, rage and desperate negotiation, you might be forced
to entirely rethink your life.

It is existential when you are standing on the ledge of a
tall building wondering whether you should jump. It is also
existential when you have joined a religious group, married
one of its members and rearranged your life to match their
expectations then discover that you have doubts about their
underlying claims. Should you trust your faith
and your prior investments, or should you face the evidence
on its own merits?

Considering getting married or divorced should be an
existential crisis, even if you don't perceive it as such at
the time. Deciding to spend (or not spend) your entire life
with one person is certainly a life-changing choice that
deserves major soul searching. Choosing a career, deciding
to have a baby, or coming to grips with some foolish
decision in your past are each existential. You should be
thinking about the whole journey of your life and how this
road will change it.

Whenever you ask yourself, "Am I worthless?" or "Have
I done the right thing?" you are in the midst of an
existential crisis. It is a crisis whenever you face a
black abyss in your life and wonder, "What do I do now?"

Existential crises can be very difficult and painful, but
you can't ignore them or brush them aside. If you do, you
could pay with your life.

It is an existential crisis when you have killed someone
and the judge announces the sentence: forty years to life.
Slam! The prison door clangs shut, and all you are free to
do now is learn how to deal with it. If you had the existential
crisis before you pulled the trigger, you might not
be in this situation right now.

People can make a lot of life-changing decisions that they
don't really think about at the time—like shooting
someone in a rage or getting married purely for love. It
doesn't become existential until you begin dealing with the
actual consequences of your decision and start thinking
about all of its long term implications. Obviously, it is
much better to have the crisis before the life-changing
choice rather than after.

Rather than having your life disrupted by a mid-life crisis,
a marriage crisis, a post-partum crisis or some other
unanticipated crisis of faith, maybe it is better to have
existential doubts all along. Maybe you should wake up
every morning with the same unresolved questions you had the
day before. Maybe you don't need any faith to begin with.

Life is stressful because much is at stake in everything
you do. If you aren't wondering, right now, who you are and
where you are going, then maybe you should be. Whether or
not you acknowledge it, you are facing some major
life-changing decisions even as we speak. Of course, I
don't know exactly what those decisions are, but I think you
do. Something you decide now, or should decide soon, could
completely rearrange your future.

In general, people hate this kind of stress and will try any
kind of trick to make the crisis go away. Whenever it
occurs to them, "Did I do the right thing?" they prefer to
get drunk or turn on the TV rather than face the question
directly. If you were to discover, after some
introspection, that you have made a significant
mistake, then you would need to repair it or at least come to
grips with it. Generally speaking, people won't do this
unless it is forced upon them. They avoid the crisis by
sweeping it under the carpet and pretending that they made
the right decision all along.

Real decision making is always painful, but if you do a
lot decision making—virtually every day of the
year—then you become better at it, and it becomes less
emotionally disruptive. A crisis becomes huge mainly when
you put it off for months or years. If you get many miles
down the wrong road, rather than only a few feet, then it
really is a disaster when the road leads to mire.

Existential stress is any regret or worry that seems to
threaten the underpinnings of your existance. It can be a
terrible feeling in the pit of your stomach—“Oh God,
what have I done?”—or it can be a continuous nagging
concern about every decision you are anticipating right now.
It's your choice.

From a practical standpoint, worries are much more
productive than regrets, because worries you can do
something about.

“I feel better about panicking about my future with my fiance now. I know I've made the right choice in choosing to marry him, but the enormity of "the rest of my life" is overwhelming. I think this is about right.”
—A bride to be! 7/18/10 (rating=3)